Tough Budget Build - Need advise

[JClarke]

Trying to spec a PC for a friend to be able to play Total Warhammer. I have been set a budget of no more than £600 including the rig and windows 10. The only things I am not looking for are the mouse/keyboard and monitor or thermal paste (have spare).

Here is the list of items I have put together myself, but I could definitely use some advise. For example, I have gone for the micro ATX as there is a good deal on the Fractal 1000 and PSU, but am then hit with higher motherboard costs. I see I can get cheaper with a H110 micro ATX board, but I am not convinced I will be able to blck overclock the CPU and am worried about RAM limitations.

Bare in mind I want to leave room for easy upgrade, probably just a better single GPU, maybe a PSU if required.

CASE and PSU - Fractal Design Core 1000 and Super Flower 450W Bronze PSU - £48.95

CPU - i3 6100 3.7Ghz - £99.95

Motherboard - Asus Z170M-Plus DDR4 Micro ATX - £102.95

Cooler - Raijintek Aidos Direct Contact CPU Cooler - £14.99

Graphics - MSI GeForce GTX 960 Gaming 2048MB - £139.99

RAM - Kingston Fury Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 - £28.99

Storage - Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB 2.5" SSD - £53.99

DVD-RW - Samsung SH-224GB/BEBE - £12.95

Wireless LAN - TP-Link 300Mbps - £14.99

Windows 10 - 64 bit DVD - £79.99

Total cost plus shipping is £610.34

Can I do better than this?

 

[StarShock]

Hello. Here is a quick go.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Gigabyte GA-Z170N-WIFI Intel Z170 (Socket 1151) DDR4 Mini ITX Motherboard= £109.99
• 1 x Kingston Fury Black 8GB (1x8GB) DDR4 PC4-17000C14 2133MHz Single Channel Module - Black (HX421C14FB2= £25.99
• 1 x Intel Core i3-6100 3.70GHz (Skylake) Socket LGA1151 Processor - Retail= £99.95
• 1 x Microsoft Windows 10 64-Bit DVD - OEM (MS-KW9-00139)= £79.99
• 1 x Fractal Design Core 1000 & XFX 430W 80+ Bronze PSU Bundle= £46.03
• 1 x Kingston 240GB SSDNow UV400 Drive SATA 6Gb/s 2.5" (7mm height) Solid State Hard Drive - (SUV400S37/2= £47.99
• 1 x Gigabyte Radeon R9 380X G1 Gaming 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (GV-R938XG1 GAMING-4GD)= £169.99
• 1 x Samsung SH-224GB/BEBE 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM M disc compatible= £12.95

Total: £604.58
(includes shipping: £11.70)
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Does he need the optical drive for anything other than installing windows? As you could just put it on a thumb stick.

I went for a mini itx motherboard, as it includes built in wifi. So saves on that.
1 stick of 8gb ram, which isn't ideal but offers a fairly easy upgrade in the future.
The R9 380x performs a little bit better than the gtx 960
Left off the cooler, figure the stock will be ok for the short term and again can easily be upgraded down the line.
Its tough

 

[JClarke]

Hi StarShock, thanks for the quick reply.

This really is becoming an exercise in taking away from one aspect to give to another.

I am not fully clued into the AMD graphics cards, but agree the R9 380X would perform better for Total Warhammer, especially when the DX12 patch is released.

I wonder though whether the higher power draw, combined with the slightly lower spec psu in your build would leave no room for a overclock to the CPU?

Cheers